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Last Of The Hippies
Dear Pete
"He who knows no limitation
Will have cause to lament"
The I-Ching, Hexagram 60, "Limitation"
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We called you Piss-Off Pete. "Piss-Off" as in: "go away, get
lost, we don't want you round here." Also you pissed people
off.
As it happens it was Rod the Mod who first called you that. I
met Rod for the first time this year and his name wasn't Rod the
Mod at all, it was Tony. I was with Steve. It was Steve who told
me that Tony was called Rod the Mod. But in those days (in the
days when Rod the Mod was called Rod the Mod and you were called
Piss-Off Pete) Steve was called Droid. Only my name hasn't
changed. I was Chris Stone then, and I'm Chris Stone now. Except
when I'm writing books, that is, when I get called CJ.
This was back in the early '70s: '73 or '74.
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You were a
rock-guitarist, very talented. You could play solos fast and
hard and hit all the right notes. The trouble was you couldn't
stop yourself from playing solos. You'd launch into a solo right
where the chorus should be, or in the verse, or in the
middle-eight. You'd launch into a solo when other people were
playing solos, or when the singer was trying to sing. Sometimes
you'd launch into a solo before everyone else had even started
to play, when they were just setting up. Other musicians refused
to play with you. No matter what you'd rehearsed only the day
before, you'd suddenly launch into a ten minute squealing,
shrieking, wired-up ego-wank guitar solo when they least
expected it, and then you'd be looking at them triumphantly as
if to say, "look at me, I'm a fucking genius". It had something
to do with your ego, which was strangely out-of-kilter. Put you
on stage and you were the embodiment of David Bowie's Ziggy
Stardust: "Making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his
mi-y-ind."
You were obsessed with Bowie. You sounded more like Bowie than
Bowie himself. Bowie was your God, your mentor. You even wrote
to Bowie once, proposing marriage. Everything Bowie did, you
wanted to do. So you started wearing make-up and dressing in
women's clothing. This was the Glam-rock era, when what had
started as the hippie revolution ended up wearing knee-length
silver stack-heel boots over crushed velvet loon-pants with
forty-inch flares. This was it's slogan: "Forward to the
barricades! But first I must check my eye-liner."
I liked you, Pete, though you were a little sad. You were
craving attention. Maybe you were craving love. I don't think
you ever found it. All anyone ever said to you was, "piss-off,
Pete."
When I first met you, you were fairly normal. It was Steve who
introduced you to me. There were a few of us. We were on our way
to a club down the docks.
Steve said, "this is Pete. He's a good guitarist."
I forget what you were wearing. I forget most things. I have the
picture of a shiny blue velvet top with flared sleeves. And
bangles too, lots of bangles, tinkling on your wrists as you
moved your arms about. A set of love-beads maybe, or a choker.
You were looking at me and smiling, a boyish, bashful, secretive
smile. I never looked beyond the surface in those days. I still
don't. So I had no idea what secrets you wanted to conceal. You
seemed like a nice guy to me. I forget what you said. Something
pretentious and airy, no doubt, something loopy but funny. I
seem to remember UFOs coming into the conversation, and LSD. I
think you were already on your alien trip by this time. But we
had a conversation nevertheless, while you continued to smile at
me in your twinkling, friendly way, laughing at yourself. You
laughed at yourself a lot in the early days.
You were strikingly good-looking, with blonde-hair and baby-blue
eyes. All the girls adored you. You were pretty and
unthreatening, an easy person to be around. There was a string
of the most devastatingly good-looking girls in Cardiff. But
then something wasn't quite right. Maybe you were bisexual.
Maybe you were just straight gay. Maybe you'd bought all of that
'70s Glam-rock rhetoric about sexual ambivalence and the
androgynous spirit. But then again, maybe it was the LSD. Good
old LSD, it changed everyone's life. In your case it turned you
into a bad-joke, a kind of tripped-out jester-fool in women's
clothing. You were the butt of your own joke in the early days
and it was possible to hold a conversation with you. In later
years you stopped smiling and you stopped making any sense at
all.
I'll have to ask Steve to help me continue the story. Steve was
closer to you than anyone.
You know Steve, of course, don't you? How could you forget him?
You'd remember him as Droid.
Steve is unique. There's nothing quite like him on this planet.
He's not really a hippie. He's an alien being from another
planet. But he seems to be keeping the hippie faith, whatever
that is. He's about 6ft tall, balding, with a sort of Egyptian
headdress of dreadlocks strung with beads dangling about his
ears, and a goatee beard. That's how he looks now. Back in the
seventies he wasn't balding, and his hair cascaded around his
face like a curtain. I'd call him a saint, only he has this
innate capacity to laugh at himself and the world. I don't know,
maybe saints do laugh uproariously at jokes about their own
misfortune while off their heads on cider or mushrooms. I
haven't met all that many saints, so I can't say. He lives on a
council estate on the outskirts of Cardiff with his son, Isaac,
and has an as-yet unrealised ambition to be an International
Rock Star; or failing that, at least to have a slot on Top of
the Pops. Maybe this book will help him realise his ambition.
Then again, maybe not.
His full name is Steven Andrews. It was from his surname that
his nick-name derived. The kids at school called him Android.
Later it was shortened to Droid.
He was one of your best friends, Pete. He was the one person who
never told you to piss-off.
"I must have met Pete probably about '73," says Steve, now. "I
think I met him in the Claude, and then I'd see him in the Old
Arcade, the Moon club, and all those sort of places. He was
pretty together. I used to hang about with Geoff and Bruce
Campbell. He could play the guitar, it was before he went really
weird. He used to have various girlfriends in those days.
"Later he started going loopy. This must have been about 75. I
was living in Cathedral Road then with a couple of other guys in
a flat. And at that time Pete came round. We were in the living
room, having a bit of a drink, a smoke, as you do, and Pete
said, could he go and meditate in the kitchen? And we thought,
yeah, let him go and meditate in the kitchen. Cos he wasn't
doing much in the room apart from staring around, making signs
on his head. So we said, yeah, go in the kitchen. A bit later we
heard this strange yelling from the kitchen, going,
Saaaaa-lllllll-eeeeeey! Or that's what it sounded like. And we
all went out in the kitchen, and Pete was there stark naked
standing in front of the window with his arms outstretched
towards the ceiling, yelling this strange cry, which sounded, to
us, like 'Sally'. I think I probably shouted out, 'Pete, what
the fuck are you doing, get out the way of the window.' Cos it
was looking out over the street, with shops and people shopping
down in the street. I think it was a Saturday and it looked out
upon Pontcanna Street, which is one of the main streets in the
area, and I was thinking, well someone's gonna call the police
or something ridiculous. And he said that he was invoking the
goddess Selene. But to us it was just like he was shouting
'Sally' with his arms outstretched stark naked in front of the
window. Which was, like, totally crazy; but there you are, that
was Pete."
Yes, that was you, Pete. That was you when you'd started to go
really weird. It was like your mind had conked out or something,
as if the brain-mechanism had slipped a gear. The ego-wank
guitar solos gave way to an ego-wank transcendentalism.
Gobbledegook flying out of your mouth in the same way that
screaming guitar solos had shrieked from your fret-board in an
earlier era. You began to develop strange ways of talking,
peculiarities of intonation and reference that made your speech
sometimes incomprehensible. For instance, you would refer to
people as "Creation" and then give them a number. You were
"Creation Number One", of course. Your girlfriend would always
be "Creation Number Two." And then you would have long periods
of silence in which you could only sign by pointing downwards at
the top of your head and making this "tssssk-tssssk" noise, like
the sound of static electricity crackling through your brain. It
was as if you were trying to tell us something, as if your brain
was really short-circuiting. "Neural damage," you'd say, in this
high-pitched, camp, robotic voice, sounding like a computerised
drag queen with a ferret up your bum. Well it was funny. In the
end it was tragic. But the most tragic thing of all is that no
one could take the tragedy seriously. Your final tragedy, Pete,
is that even your tragedy was funny.
I've often wondered where the shift came, from the merely
eccentric to the psychopathically certifiable. A friend of a
friend went out with you for a while. In those days you were
only what you would call unconventional. And that was kind-of
the spirit of the time. Unconventionality was the norm, breaking
the rules was the rule. People would be sitting round with you,
usually stoned, when you would start breathing hard and gazing
into the distance. "Nirvana," you might say, in a flat, nasal
voice. And then you would start weaving tales of lotus flowers
and other Far-Eastern religious paraphernalia with a kind of
mad, twisted logic. You were fascinating, in the way that the
way-out is often fascinating to the young. It was the kind of
thing we all did. Almost everyone fancied himself a guru in
those days.
At other times you might say, "meditate upon the causes of
corruption," or tell people that the ego should be abolished.
That's another irony of the time (and one we will come back to):
that the demolition of ego was seen as the goal of all of our
endeavours, and yet that there was more egotism about then than
in almost any other decade. There can be nothing more
egotistical than the declaration against ego. What else is
making the declaration but the ego itself? Always beware of
people who call themselves egoless beings. They're the biggest
egotists of the lot.
You lived in a flat full of Indian cloth with tasselled drapes
and incense, with dangly things hanging from the wall. Low
table. A mattress on the floor. Pictures of the Buddha and Hindu
gods. Rugs and cushions, like a dark, warm womb. And at first
you were not without a certain sense-of-humour. You'd say
something kind of weird and wobbly and people would laugh, and
you would laugh with them. Maybe you got addicted to the
laughter. Maybe that was a front and you wanted to be taken
seriously. After a while people started calling you Piss-Off
Pete, and you even kind of liked it. "Piss-Off" was said in an
affectionate way: not so much "go away" as "oh come off it Pete,
that's just crazy." And yet everyone encouraged you to it. It
was what they wanted. The bizarre, the strange, the deranged
even. Syd Barrett's post- Pink Floyd meanderings had a cult
status (they probably still do). Madness was all the rage.
I'm sure it was round at your place that I first heard The Man
Who Sold The World by David Bowie. If it wasn't, it ought to
have been. It's an album about madness and the fear of madness.
But whereas Bowie's character was a tragic hero, yours was a
tacky parody.
Obviously you were struggling with your sexuality at this time.
There were no aid-structures as there are now for the
potentially gay. You were a beautiful man, surrounded by women,
and admired by other men. But in some secret part, maybe, you
longed for something more than admiration: maybe you longed for
the love of other men too. Who knows? Maybe in these days of
open sexuality you would not have had to have gone through what
you went through then. It was about this time that you shifted
from the merely effeminate styles of early Glam-rock into total
transvestism. Again, this was tragically funny. For all your
blonde good-looks, you were very much a man. The sort of man who
needed to shave twice a day. No matter how much make-up you
wore, you could never disguise the dark stain of stubble across
your jaw, and for all the femininity of your clothing, your
hairy, muscular arms still poked out from whatever
off-the-shoulder little number you were wearing at the time. It
was incongruous and comic in the way that the PG Tips chimps are
incongruous and comic. Incongruous and comic and just a little
sad.
One day you were sitting in your darkened flat with your
girlfriend, Jane, and another girl, when you were suddenly
gripped by the idea that the two women were the embodiments of
evil spirits. There was a spear nearby, just one of those things
(along with the incense holders and brass gods and African
masks) that you used to decorate your flat. You launched the
spear across the room in a fury of sexual suspicion. The two
girls were only saved by a washing line that was dangling across
the room. The spear bounced off it and deflected harmlessly
away. At the time that sort of thing just seemed normal. It was
just another crazy moment in a season of crazy moments, lost in
a daze of drug-induced confusion.
Later you had another girlfriend, Terry. You would order her
around and treat her really badly. One day Steve was round your
flat. You said, in your by now usual camp-robotic style, "Woman,
prepare carboniferous de-hydrated material." She knew what you
meant. She was used to your way of saying things by now. And she
went into the kitchen to make the toast. When she brought the
toast back in and handed it to you, you refused to eat it.
Instead you stood on the bed waving your arms about and going "tsssk
tsssk, neural damage," and all the rest, and doing one of your
mad, camp performances. Terry didn't know what to make of it.
She was confused by it all. Still, she must have loved you
because she stayed with you quite a while.
Finally you became openly gay. There was a string of boyfriends
to replace the girlfriends you'd had before. But things were
swiftly degenerating too. You were making less and less sense of
it all. The humour disappeared, and you stopped taking care of
your appearance. You still wore women's clothing, but now you
had dirty fingernails to go with the stubble and the muscular
arms.
Steve went out with you for a while, as you know. The following
is Steve's account of your brief time together:
"My relationship with Pete? Well that didn't last very long.
Basically I was having no success with women, again, and Pete
was sort of the next best thing to a woman that I could find. He
looked sort of like a woman. One night in the Moon Club some guy
came up to me and said, 'cor, who's that tasty blonde chick?'
And I said, 'that chick is a bloke actually.' And he said, 'well
I don't care, she's gorgeous.' I was completely out of it on
various substances most of the time anyway, so that was how it
came about. But I can remember actually being out with him and
holding hands and necking in a public place, and that this felt
quite good. You know, when you're actually out with someone, you
have a sort of sense of self-pride that, 'here I am walking down
the street with a partner.' And you can sort of show off to the
world that you've managed to get it together to become an item
with somebody else. And I can remember having that sort of
feeling, being out with Pete. And also the idea that because
this was a gay relationship being shoved in the face of the
world, this was a good thing to do, sort of to liberate people,
and this sort of idea. But basically I couldn't handle Pete, cos
Pete didn't used to speak for ages, or he just used to mutter
utter strangeness, and tap his head and make noises and all this
stuff. So conversation-wise it was a waste of time. Also I felt
that it wasn't right for me. I sort of learnt from it that I
wasn't really gay, that I was basically heterosexual, failing as
a heterosexual and going after the next best thing. And I also
felt guilty in a way after that. Pete did want this relationship
with me on a physical level, but I didn't want that with him.
And I felt that my relationship with Pete was something like
that, that if I could have had a real girl I would have dropped
Pete like a shot. And I felt quite bad about that at the time. I
used to have Pete running after me for some time after that.
"It came about that I was with Pete because I used to use his
flat as another place I used to crash. I used to have a need for
somewhere to stay on many occasions, cos I'd taken a load of
downers, and Pete's was a place where I could almost guarantee I
could go there and I wouldn't be turned away. Also, I used to
understand some of his mystic psychobabble, some of that made a
lot of sense to me, and I could relate to that, so I used to
like listening to what he did have to say when he had something
to say. And also cos my head was totally messed up around that
time-period, I could relate to his condition, so we did actually
have some points of similarity. And so it came about that I was
with him because I used to stay around his flat quite often."
So - no maybes any more - you were gay, Pete. You were gay, but
you didn't hang around with gay people. Why was that? They were
probably telling you to piss off too.
You see, you'd lost your sense of humour somewhere down the
line. You just weren't funny any more. You'd started to take
yourself too seriously. All the irony was gone. And this is
another observation of mine, that it was the ones who could
laugh at themselves who survived this time, and the ones who
couldn't who went under.
"There was a time when I was in the Old Arcade with him once,"
Steve continues, laughing, "and he was just sitting cross-legged
in lotus position on the floor, chanting OM over and over again.
And he got chucked out that time. The bar manager came out and
said, 'if you're not buying a drink or anything, if you're just
gonna make this stupid noise, then you can just get out of
here.' And he got thrown out.
"Later, it would have been about '77 or '78, Pete came 'round to
see me. He had some trouble, they'd stopped his money, and he
wanted me to go to the Social with him. So we went down the
Social Security offices which is down the docks, and we were
just waiting about there for bloody ages, as you do in these
places. They say, 'OK, take a seat and we'll get somebody to see
you.' Pete was dressed in his usual sort of gear, some sort of
strange head-scarf that he had on and earrings and bangles and
lipstick, some sort of glitzy top and leggings, platform boots,
handbag, that sort of gear; and nail varnish on his nails,
probably chipped."
Eventually the man at the reception desk called you over, and
Steve went with you.
"So you are Peter Alexander Pearce," the Social Security Officer
said.
You did your usual. "Ooooooooooohhhh, ch ch ch ch," you said,
sounding like a mad robotic mannequin in the throes of a
mechanistic orgasm, wriggling your bum about on the functional
seating and pointing with your finger to the top of your head,
signing in your inimitable way. "Neural damage," you added, as
if that answered his question.
The bemused Social Security Officer had to pause. "Well I'll
repeat the question again: you are Peter Alexander Pearce of
Llandough Street, Cardiff?"
"Ooooooooohhhh,
Stel-lar Intel-ligence," you said, emphasising the syllables
like some camp mantra, with a meaningful look in your eye. I
can't imagine what the poor man was thinking at this point. He
just looked back and forth at the two of you as if wondering
which planet you'd recently arrived from.
Steve stepped into the conversation. He said, "I'm sorry but my
friend hasn't been very well, he hasn't had any money and he
hasn't been eating properly, so perhaps it would be better if
you had a word with me."
The guy was relieved. At last, a normal human being, albeit one
wearing tartan loon pants, a tartan jacket, tartan tee-shirt and
tartan shoes, with a mass of black curly hair almost covering
his face and a beard the size of a battleship. At least the man
made sense. "Well yeah," he said, "we need some sort of
confirmation that he's been paying rent at the address that
we've got him down for. And if you can get a rent book or
something, then bring that in or send it in and that will
confirm his current status."
"Yeah, OK," said Steve, "we could do that."
And then you left, and went back to your flat.
When you got back Steve asked you for your rent book. "Tssssk,
tssssk, ch ch ch," you said, staring and signing and waving your
arms about, casting meaningful glances around the room and
letting out the occasional tripped-out orgasmic giggle.
Steve had had enough. "Look Pete," he said, sternly, "we need
this rent book, cos I've told the social security people I'm
gonna get this information to them." And then, after a long
wait, and more signs and performances, you finally brought out a
really tacky looking rent book, battered and stained and looking
like it had been used for drying the washing-up over a number of
years. Steve opened it up and there was nothing in it. Well the
first page was filled, but the rest of it was blank, which
showed that for the last two years you hadn't actually paid any
rent to anybody.
Steve said, "look, this is no fucking good. We want proof that
you've been paying rent. This is crazy, I can't show them this,
it basically shows that they've been paying you money and you
haven't been paying it to anyone. I don't understand this. I've
got to show them something, so can you explain yourself here.
Why hasn't the landlord filled it in? What's happened to the
money? I hope you haven't wasted it all."
Finally you signalled to Steve to give you the rent book, which
he did. And you scrawled across it, in block capitals,
PSYCHOPATHS STOLE MY RENT SAVINGS.
Steve said, "I definitely can't show them this Pete, you've
basically ruined the rent book now. Who are the psychopaths?
Where are the bloody rent savings?"
Well you could be lucid at times, especially when you were in a
corner. You went on to tell Steve that the psychopaths were some
people who were living upstairs, squatters, and they'd moved out
now, and apparently they'd bust into your room, and you'd put
the rent savings in a box and they'd stolen the box with all the
money in - all told like that, in a breathless rush of
uncharacteristic normality - these were the psychopaths who'd
stolen the rent savings. Steve thought that the whole thing was
totally ridiculous, even that you'd put all the money in this
box, which was asking for trouble; but anyway, that's what you
had done. And you wanted to know what would happen to you then.
Steve said, "I dunno, I can't show them this, I just don't know
what to say really." He was trying to think what he could do. He
said, "well you could either end up being chucked out of here,
or you could end up in Whitchurch, the mental hospital, or maybe
in trouble with the police, I just don't know. Maybe you'll end
up on the street."
You said, "oooooooooohhhhh Droid, can I move in with you and
Susan?"
"I don't think so, not really," said Steve, nonplussed. He
didn't know what to do. He didn't know what to say. You were a
puzzle to him like you were a puzzle to everyone else by this
time. He just couldn't handle it. He made his excuses and left.
And shortly after that somebody told him that you'd been taken
into Whitchurch, which is where you were for a long period.
There was just nothing that Steve could do about it.
"Pete said to me once that when he was in town people would
cross the street to get out of his way and he used to see these
people and it used to affect him. He said, 'people never come up
to me and say, "oh hi Pete, why don't you call round sometime,
or, let's go for a coffee or something."' They used to go, 'oh
fucking hell, it's Piss-Off Pete,' and make a bee-line to get
out of his way. And he used to be aware that people were calling
him Piss-Off Pete and doing all they could to keep out of his
way."
The story continues. Steve's common-law wife, Susan had given
birth to their son in 1979. And then Susan had cracked up too,
and was waving her hands about and locking herself in the
bathroom and talking all sorts of babble. Steve just seems to
have this innate capacity to draw madness to him. It's like some
sort of magnetism, unhappy serendipity.
He asked you what you thought the reason for all this was, why
Susan was locking herself in the bathroom and waving her arms
about. Maybe he thought, since your conditions were so similar,
that you might have some answer to this. And this was your
diagnosis: "A Thetan is in a body or approaching a body," and
then you did some more of that tsssht, tsssht stuff,
ooooooohhhhh. "And that was it, that was the Pete diagnosis of
what Susan's condition was: 'A Thetan is in a body or
approaching a body.'"
"Thetan"
is a Church of Scientology word, by the way. It refers to the
soul as an alien being from another planet.
You'd use Scientology terminology quite a lot, Steve remembers.
You did a song which basically consisted of you calling out
numbers at random, for the numbers of UFOs. It went something
like this: "UFO 4, operating Thetan 7, advance Org A.L.O.A." And
then maybe something like, "UFO 51, operating Thetan 75," and on
like that.
"Later I went round to see him. Susan said to me that she was
concerned about Pete. This was before he was hospitalised.
Around the time he was sort of resurrected in a way, and he was
coming round to see us. Susan was concerned about him, and she
said, why didn't I go round to see how he was, and if I wanted I
could invite him round. So I went round to see him. I just
walked in cos the door was just left open, and at that
particular point his front windows were smashed through and
there was no body else living in Llandough Street then, the
squatters who he called the madmen psychopaths from upstairs,
they'd gone, and he was there in the bottom flat, and he was
just lying on his mattress."
You were like a wounded animal, Steve told me, lying there on
your mattress, in that filthy, cold flat. It was no longer a
womb. More like a ruined sepulchre, waiting for the coffin to
arrive. Steve asked you what you were doing and, after one of
your customary long silences, you said you were waiting to die.
Steve told you what Susan had said, and that if you wanted to
come round and see them, then you could. At which point he could
see the life and the energy rushing back into you. It was like
someone had switched the lights back on. Your face lit up. You
were enthused by the whole idea of it, that somebody actually
wanted to know. "Uh oh oh, ooooooohhhh Droid, oh," you squirmed
in appreciation. And on and on like this. "Droid, oooooooo,"
rolling round on your mattress, wriggling with pleasure. It was
at this point that Steve noticed that across your wall you'd
scrawled, "David Bowie SOS." That was your last plea for help
when you were waiting to die.
"Then he came round to see me and Sue, and within about two days
she was totally pissed off with him, and she couldn't handle
him. He was coming round on a regular basis everyday, and he was
throwing stones at the window, he was waiting outside at the
flat, tapping on the door, and going, 'oooohhhh, it's me, Peter,
don't keep me outside like a cheap whore,' and stuff like this."
This could be at three o'clock in the morning. Or you'd be
outside and they'd hear stones tapping on the window, and they'd
look down and see you in the garden with this total Pete
expression on your face, plastered in make-up with a headscarf
on. You'd be looking up pathetically, like a dog, the way an
animal looks at you, for sympathy, for attention, and begging
for hospitality, for love, and Steve would think, "oh there's
Pete," and feel that he had to do something. And this went on
day in and day out until Susan had had enough. She couldn't
handle it any more, she said. And, the truth is, Steve couldn't
handle it either. After that you were taken into Whitchurch.
"The last time I saw Pete," Steve tells me, drawing the story to
it's lonely end, "was in Richmond Road where I was living with
Susan. Susan was still freaking out at the time. Pete was in
Whitchurch, but he was allowed out on day release with the
students from upstairs who used to go and collect him. Pete's
mother had come round the house for some reason."
Fiona, one of the student girls from upstairs, was taking it
upon herself to be responsible for you, Steve says. At the
beginning she was moralistic about the entire thing, about
psychiatric treatment and the drugs they seemed to handing out
like Smarties, which she thought was wrong. She thought that
there had to be some other way. But when confronted with the
reality of yours and Susan's madness she changed her mind. "Well
maybe, you know, the things I thought were wrong, maybe they
aren't wrong. Maybe they should give them all these drugs,
whatever drugs they need to control it, cos I just don't know
how to handle it," she said to Steve.
Steve continues:
"Pete was upstairs lying on this couch thing, staring at the
ceiling, and his mother was in the room and was over by his head
and was waving her hands about and saying, 'Peter my son, we're
all praying for you, there are angels all around your head.' And
Pete's just looking into space and squealing, 'ha ha ha ha
ooooohhhh.' And I'm thinking, 'fucking hell, it's not surprising
that he's fucked up if his mother is telling him that there's
angels all around his head.' He's from this religious
background, as you know. And it gave some idea to all of us what
was wrong with him. I think that was actually the last time I
saw him. He had to go back to Whitchurch after all that, and
then I heard that he was transferred to this mental hospital up
North. I didn't see him again."
No one in Cardiff saw you again after that. No doubt, that's
what your mother was doing there that day, coming to pick you up
to take you back to your home town. And after that, you were
gone. It was like you'd stepped through a door into some other
world, like you'd joined the Carnival of Madness and couldn't
get off the ride. There's no saying where you are now.
And that's it, Pete. What more can I say? You were a good man
dragged down by madness. Many people were dragged down by
madness in those days. Syd Barrett of the Pink Floyd, Peter
Green of Fleetwood Mac, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. These
were the celebrated cases. Ordinary people thrust into genius by
a drug which knew no limits, but who had no mechanism for
dealing with the responsibilities of genius. And many, many more
like you, who no one remembers but their friends.
And who is there to blame? It wasn't your fault was it? It
wasn't Steve's fault. It wasn't my fault, though maybe I could
have done more at the time, if I'd have known what you were
suffering. But I was a selfish young man, too caught up in my
own concerns to notice what was going on in anybody else's life;
too busy pursuing my own salvation to notice that there were
others more in need than me.
That was what it was like at the time. Vanity and indulgence.
The search for salvation had become a personal pursuit. Each
looking to his own. The hippie dream, expansive and
outward-looking though it had been in its early years, had
turned in on itself. It was all "me, me, me, self, self, self."
It wasn't anybody's fault. It was the era in which we lived. And
if we were mad in our own ways (and you were mad in a
certifiable way) then it was because the era was mad.
What follows is the story of that era, and of its aftermath.
I've addressed it to you, Pete. But actually it is for anyone
who cares to listen.
Contents:
Chapter 1: "Dear Pete."
Chapter 2: "Hippies, Heads and Freaks."
Chapter 3: "Free Love."
Chapter 4: "Oops."
Chapter 5: "Rod The Mod Takes The Plunge."
Chapter 6: "Druid Time."
Chapter 7: "Huna Druzz," or, "Another Failed Love-Quest, An
Apple And A Cup Of Coffee."
Chapter 8: "Enlicenment."
Chapter 9: "Not An Earth Mother," or, "Nasturtiums In Barbed
Wire."
Chapter 10: "The Rules Of Sensible Driving."
Chapter 11: "And Another Thing."
Chapter 12: "The Pilton Pop Festival."
Chapter 13: "The Trouble With Hippies."
Chapter 14: "Des."
Chapter 15: "Glastonbury."
Chapter 16: "PS"
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